Religious Affairs Office

On 13 and 14 February, the Pati Llimona Civic Centre hosted the workshop entitled ‘Digital religions: Technological and spiritual transformations’, which opened with two academic lectures and then featured three panel discussions that addressed religious and spiritual dynamics in digital spaces, primarily focusing on young people's practices and customs.

The workshop was organised by the Office of Religious Affairs (OAR) and curated by Avi Astor, sociologist and member of the research group on Research on the Sociology of Religion (ISOR) and the project ‘Digital Islam across Europe: Understanding Muslims’ participation in online Islamic environments’ (DIGITISLAM), in which Astor is the principal researcher for the Spanish team.

Check the workshop’s photo gallery here!

How does digitalisation influence spirituality? Can religious communities thrive online? What challenges are personal beliefs facing in the information age? What space does religion occupy in the social media and how do young believers interact with it? These and many other questions were at the core of the wide array of reflections in the workshop on ‘Digital religions: Technological and spiritual transformations’. The workshop began with a brief introduction by Barcelona City Council’s commissioner for Citizen Relations and Cultural and Religious Diversity, Sara Belbeida, who discussed the Internet as ‘yet another space where communities are built’ and said that ‘diversity is not only expressed on streets, in homes and in neighbourhoods but also in the digital sphere’.

Next, the first lecture featured Gary R. Bunt, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the principal researcher in the ‘Digital British Islam’ project and co-researcher with DIGITISLAM. Bunt listed some of the ways the digital mediation of Islam takes place, both on the social media and in more specific tools, like prayer apps or the chatbot ImamAI, and how this mediation influences the definition of authorities. Next, Fouad Gehad Marei, a researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, Germany, presented the article ‘God’s Influencers: Social Media Users Shape Religion and Pious Self-Fashioning’ for the first time in public (Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 13(2), 2024). Gerhad summarised some of the article’s conclusions and underscored the close ties between online and offline spaces and his commitment to thinking about religion from change and openness to the new digital paradigms. He invited the audience to reflect on authenticity in dissemination on the social media.

The second part of the first day of reflection consisted of the panel discussion on ‘Digital religion: A multidimensional phenomenon’, featuring Rosa Martínez Cuadros, postdoctoral researcher in the Anthropology Department at the University of Barcelona, and Dr Antonio de Diego, assistant professor in the Philosophy Area at the University of Málaga. Martínez spoke about the preliminary results of the DIGITISLAM project in Spain, including Muslims’ high use of digital spaces (45.5% of respondents), which does not rule out a feedback dynamic between online and offline spaces, especially in terms of authority. De Diego, in turn, drew several reflections from his research on the Sufi Muslim brotherhood of Tijaniyya and its online dynamics, which can be extrapolated to other traditions, like the epistemological and ontological shift resulting from the unique features of the digital world, which has affected the esoteric dimension and has spread ‘the secret’: ‘There is no longer a distinction between what is Dajah, or evident, and Ba’at’in, or occult’.

On 14 February there were two panel discussions focused on religious and spiritual young people and their digital practices. ‘Religious influencers: Faith in the digital age’ brought together four young people who share their respective beliefs via the social media: Glòria López, from the feminist coordinator Alcem la Veu; Ishvari Jahnava Devi Dasi, administrator of the Instagram account of ISKCON Barcelona; Federico Szarfer, co-founder of the Jewish cultural platform Mozaika, where Jewish Futures is managed; and Hajar Hniti, founder and director of the Acadèmia Khayrukum, which teaches Arab and Islamic studies. This panel discussed two dimensions of the social media via the participants’ experiences: on the one hand, the social media offer spaces that were traditionally off-limits, as López said about women and Christianity, while they also provide believers with the opportunity to spread the word about their beliefs. ‘You cannot love what you don’t know, and we open all our doors with the social media’, said Szarfer. However, these spaces also give hatred a voice, yet all the speakers claimed that this can be answered calmly: ‘We avoid it, but if they want to ask, they should come’, said Jahnava Devi Dasi. Ultimately, this dichotomy is part of the unique features of the social media; as Hniti said, ‘just like they help us spread the message and engage in dialogue, they also open the doors to people who hold a totally erroneous view of religion’.

The workshop closed with a panel discussion which further explored the experiences of the first one and reflected on the possibilities and risks of using the digital space for religious practice and knowledge. Entitled ‘Young people and religious pluralism: Experiences and community dialogue with a click’, the participants were Raid Homs, director of the first group of Muslim Scouts of Spain; Maria Jerusalén Amador López, member of the Philadelphia Evangelical Church, researcher, trainer and Roma activist; Alba Martorell, a participant in Alcem la Veu; and Artur Carbonell, member of the Bahá’í Community of Barcelona. The speakers concurred regarding COVID-19’s influence on their use of the social media, and they stressed that despite the importance of being in-person in their religious practices, their day-to-day lives include digital dynamics: ‘We used to view the social media as promoting individualism, but with the pandemic our communities turned this on its head’, said Amador. Thus, the digital space enables them to complement their customs, ‘enrich the experience’, as Carbonell said, and improve the visibility of communities and traditions. Yet at the same time, this visibility is associated with the tendency towards personalism and the risk of suffering from discrimination.

In conclusion, ‘Digital religions: Technological and spiritual transformations’ was a workshop that sparked an interdisciplinary debate that underscored the need to view religious practice as a changing phenomenon that is now technologically engaged in that it integrates practitioners’ own lives with the current context. Hence, the communities now use the social media ‘not only for very practical issues like information searches but also for personal growth and to hold gatherings with people from different parts of the world, which were untenable a few years ago’, said Núria Serra, head of the Department of Interculturality and Religious Diversity, at the closure of the event. Therefore, the goal is to take advantage of the technical affordances of the digital media, understand the hidden risks and set forth all the implications they have as an accessory to in-person practice.

On the occasion of this workshop, the OAR presented the interreligious and interfaith dialogue groups (GDI), gathering spaces whose goal is to showcase and shed light on religious pluralism by promoting conversations among people from different beliefs and faiths in order to foster networking and social cohesion. These groups have been holding gatherings for several years, but recently a dialogue group specifically for women was created, and in line with some of the reflections at this workshop, a group for young people is being created, which will start holding gatherings soon.